Archive for the ‘Sales’ Category

This is the second in a series of articles on social media marketing. The theme is “Making Sales through Social Media Marketing.” This article focuses on “How to Execute Effective Social Media Marketing” and “How to Increase Online Presence.”

The target audience must first be determined in order to plan the marketing campaign. Every plan must be based on a target market analysis. You need to know the types of social media sites they are using, the things that they look for when they use those sites, and what content must be used to catch the attention of these prospective customers.

Blatant marketing/selling on social media marketing sites doesn’t work. The approach must be more subtle. The goal is to increase online presence, create backlinks from a major traffic site, and build brand.

Increase Online Presence

Whether the business has been around for quite awhile or just starting, it is important to build its presence on the internet if it wants to be exposed to its target audience/market.

In our next blog entry we will discuss “Creating Backlinks” and”Building Brand.”

This is the first in a series of three articles on social media marketing. The theme is “Making Sales through Social Media Marketing.”

Social media marketing has been greatly used by open-minded business owners who understand that in this day and age, traditional marketing alone does not contribute much to a business’ competitive edge, especially if a competitor is maintaining an online presence. Social media is seen by many marketers as the next gold rush. Studies show that social media campaigns drive traffic, promote any brand, and generate leads that build influence, which eventually generate sales.

“Social” means a “friendly gathering,” “media” means “a form of communication,” and “marketing” means “processes for creating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society in general.” As a phrase and in context, social media marketing can be explained as an online gathering for communications that are part of a process designed to create, deliver, and exchange offerings for customers, clients, partners, and society.

Strategies for social media marketing programs are focused on creating content that attracts online users’ attention, generates web conversations, and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. Some of the more widely used social networking sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, and StumbleUpon. A message posted on any of the sites spreads from user to user and gets responses because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. It then becomes more like a social buzz or “word of mouth.”

The problem some people have with social media marketing is in their understanding of what it is supposed to do. Some are interested but don’t know how to use it. Others don’t believe in its value to their sites or businesses.

In our next blog entry we will discuss “How to Execute Effective Social Media Marketing” and “How to Increase Online Presence.”

Ever since the popularity of social media sites has eclipsed Google as the most highly visited sites on the Internet, SEO strategists have been trying to determine how important the use of social media is as it relates to the way a website ranks in Google.

According to Jim Connolly, in an article entitled Google, Social Media and SEO, “because of the secrecy that surrounds Google’s algorithm, it’s not possible to say definitely what kind of additional influence this is having on search results.” Connolly goes on to explain why he believes that if you want to improve your ranking in Google you need to incorporate social media marketing in your SEO strategy.

Many of our clients have been asking about Google’s PageRank. What is PageRank? As explained in this article, “Google ranks a page according to the number and quality of links leading to that page.” So every page in your website has a PageRank. For example, if a page in your site has 20 quality links pointing to it, it will rank higher than another web page that has only 5 links leading to it. “Quality links come from pages that are themselves ‘important’ (Google’s own terminology).

Google PageRank is based on back links. Back links are links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.” You might want to check out Wikipedia’s explanation of PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank). It has a terrific diagram that visually explains it. So read the article and how to increase the PageRank of the pages in your website.

Over the years many of our clients have asked us to compare the benefits of organic, natural SEO to paid search. In this detailed article, the author, Kabir Bedi, takes us through a thorough analysis of both forms of SEO right down to ROI. It’s a terrific article that anyone who is considering paid search should read.